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[MrRoboto75]

but then how do the slumlords make their profits

Burn down the property for insurance money.

[Folly]

Bomb threat currently disrupting CNN's programming.
Is there any chance it might not be another Trump Nut?

[Trekkin]

Bomb threat currently disrupting CNN's programming.
Is there any chance it might not be another Trump Nut?

It's just a phoned threat, so yes, I'd say so. It could just be some random idiot prankster with no real ideology.

Sure it's more likely to be political, but until we actually see the MAGA shrine let's reserve judgement.

[redwallzyl]

The houses weren't built by credit. They were built by labor. We demonstrably built them. They did not spring forth by the divine decree of a real estate developer.

That in mind, you have no ground to stand on in claiming that housing can't be offered decently. It is plainly materially possible, obstructed only by the infinite consumption of the ruling class.

Given the ridiculous growth of pointlessly large and expensive houses near me I'm inclined to Agree with you. Also our insistence on specific types of houses. The US needs more earthen based houses and other climate appropriate designs instead of sticking wooden houses with AC and green laws in the desert. Also rammed earth houses are just generally awesome.

[Trekkin]

Also our insistence on specific types of houses. The US needs more earthen based houses and other climate appropriate designs instead of sticking wooden houses with AC and green laws in the desert. Also rammed earth houses are just generally awesome.

This is true, but it's important to keep in mind that where the relevant zoning laws are concerned it's not so much "the US" as a national entity so much as the individual cities trying to keep affordable housing impossible right where it's most needed because, in short, "job creators" don't like being reminded that poor people exist. This is a problem that needs tons of little solutions rather than one big law handed down from DC.

[wierd]

A big part of it is "But ITS DIRT!  DIIIRRRRTT!"  screamed in a shrill ultra-suprano by the home owner's association reps.

I agree, rammed earth, cob, and the like are all excellent and low-cost housing construction methods that produce very durable, very affordable, and energy efficient dwellings.

The problem is the combination of civic leaders who think "ITS DIRT!!" in unison with the home owners association types. The latter are intrinsically opposed to these kinds of dwellings BECAUSE they are inexpensive. (One of the functions of the home owners association is to keep home values up, AND RISING. Anything that might detract from that is the spawn of satan, and must be expunged with holy fire. Also, it does not meet their aesthetic expectations, even though such homes can be works of art in and of themselves.)

City inspectors are not really trained in how to inspect such dwellings, since they are a radical departure from traditional timber-frame+foundation dwellings.

Throw in the overall "american" unreasonable fear and loathing of anything different or unexpected, and you come away with why there are few such dwellings. (I would not be surprised if the various bigot types considered rammed earth and cob homes to be middle-eastern and third world.  Never mind the very stately and modern ones you can find in Europe.)

[Trekkin]

There are legitimate engineering concerns with structural rammed earth as regards reconciling the desires of environmentalists with the constraints imposed by everything from physics to regulation. Even NAREBA's proposed standards for SRE construction include empirical testing (ASTM's E2392 is similar), because the people who want rammed earth want to use local materials, and soil is obviously different in different places.  If you don't know how strong the SRE is, you don't know what you can build with it, so now your architect doesn't know how to change the design until someone builds some local SRE and tests its relevant structural characteristics, which costs time and money. That also doesn't tell you about wear resistance, particularly resistance to moisture, so the longevity of the building is also harder to predict; you can of course point to rammed-earth buildings that have endured for millennia, but you don't see all the ones that didn't, and we know pure SRE doesn't fare well against things like earthquakes and is typically found where certain characteristics of climate and soil converge. So now the inspector, however completely trained, also can't be certain about its structural soundness over time. Reinforcement helps, but in addition to being less sustainable and more expensive and less trendy it's also unknown how the soil will react to the reinforcement, so that's more testing.

This is generally when the same people who think all problems are caused by other people, particularly experts, just not being as clever as they are will rush to suggest how other people's money be spent in sweeping programs to solve the problem -- and, as usual, if we had the will and ability to make those changes we'd also solve a lot of other, more pressing problems.

[smjjames]

A big part of it is "But ITS DIRT!  DIIIRRRRTT!"  screamed in a shrill ultra-suprano by the home owner's association reps.

I agree, rammed earth, cob, and the like are all excellent and low-cost housing construction methods that produce very durable, very affordable, and energy efficient dwellings.

The problem is the combination of civic leaders who think "ITS DIRT!!" in unison with the home owners association types. The latter are intrinsically opposed to these kinds of dwellings BECAUSE they are inexpensive. (One of the functions of the home owners association is to keep home values up, AND RISING. Anything that might detract from that is the spawn of satan, and must be expunged with holy fire. Also, it does not meet their aesthetic expectations, even though such homes can be works of art in and of themselves.)

City inspectors are not really trained in how to inspect such dwellings, since they are a radical departure from traditional timber-frame+foundation dwellings.

Throw in the overall "american" unreasonable fear and loathing of anything different or unexpected, and you come away with why there are few such dwellings. (I would not be surprised if the various bigot types considered rammed earth and cob homes to be middle-eastern and third world.  Never mind the very stately and modern ones you can find in Europe.)

Don't forget adobe mud brick of the kind you'd find out here in the deserts of the west.

There are legitimate engineering concerns with structural rammed earth as regards reconciling the desires of environmentalists with the constraints imposed by everything from physics to regulation. Even NAREBA's proposed standards for SRE construction include empirical testing (ASTM's E2392 is similar), because the people who want rammed earth want to use local materials, and soil is obviously different in different places.  If you don't know how strong the SRE is, you don't know what you can build with it, so now your architect doesn't know how to change the design until someone builds some local SRE and tests its relevant structural characteristics, which costs time and money. That also doesn't tell you about wear resistance, particularly resistance to moisture, so the longevity of the building is also harder to predict; you can of course point to rammed-earth buildings that have endured for millennia, but you don't see all the ones that didn't, and we know pure SRE doesn't fare well against things like earthquakes and is typically found where certain characteristics of climate and soil converge. So now the inspector, however completely trained, also can't be certain about its structural soundness over time. Reinforcement helps, but in addition to being less sustainable and more expensive and less trendy it's also unknown how the soil will react to the reinforcement, so that's more testing.

This is generally when the same people who think all problems are caused by other people, particularly experts, just not being as clever as they are will rush to suggest how other people's money be spent in sweeping programs to solve the problem -- and, as usual, if we had the will and ability to make those changes we'd also solve a lot of other, more pressing problems.

Ah, but it's just an ENGINEERING problem. True, it'd have to comply with stuff like earthquake resistance, but there would certainly be ways to reinforce such structures. Hybrid materials could work and materials research could look into emulating the beneficial properties of such structures while being stronger, and possibly cheap.

[wierd]

 
Don't get me wrong Trekkin, I agree.  You need controls to set quality thresholds, in order to make sane compliance regulations.  Failure to do so is giving carte blanche to make deathtraps. (ANY construction method can be a deathtrap if improper engineering practices or poor material selection are employed. Regulation prevents those from being employed. It's their reason for being.)

To get those controls, you have to perform empirical experiment.  However, I contest that it would really be that expensive.  Concrete is routinely tested, for instance, so that a given mixture can have reliably repeatable construction properties.  Concrete is more expensive to produce than rammed earth (quarrying, kilning, and shipping the lime. Dredging, washing, grading, and shipping the sand.  All vastly more expensive than the vibration separation of dirt.) and the testing would be similar. (Rammed earth samples from homogenized sample intended for site construction is compression tested and slump tested, then graded using the same or similar tools to those used to grade concrete.)  The cost center would be a couple of one-off constructions used for empirical wear-testing. (Similar to those created for fire performance testing of insulation and wallboard products.)  These would set the baseline for the local materials.

Similar stories for cob, where the amendment material selection would be constrained by what has been tested, and what the resulting performance ratings were.  (I would laugh if this finally became a viable place to dispose of lawn grass clippings on an industrial scale.)

Sure, this means that you have to declare what geological formation you sourced your earth body from, and what biological amendments you added (in the case of cob), but that is the cost of making structures that dont kill people.   

[Kagus]

But my girlfriend makes fun of me when I build a dirt house in Minecraft...

[wierd]

Cob houses can be quite neat looking.

Spoiler: big images (click to show/hide)

They can also be quite ordinary. (this is what I understand is the normal cob house style in Europe)

Spoiler: small image (click to show/hide)

Regardless, they are still made from a mixture of subsoil clay and organic matter. Usually grass, straw, or .. traditionally... manure.  (modern ones usually use grass or straw.)

[Trekkin]

Ah, but it's just an ENGINEERING problem. True, it'd have to comply with stuff like earthquake resistance, but there would certainly be ways to reinforce such structures. Hybrid materials could work and materials research could look into emulating the beneficial properties of such structures while being stronger, and possibly cheap.

I did mention reinforcement; there are indeed ways to reinforce rammed-earth structures, running all the way from adding cement to the earth itself (this is one of the components of stabilized rammed earth) to filling in a normal frame structure with soil so it's not a structural material at all. Finding the point on that spectrum needed for a given structure in a given area is not a trivial problem.

We do have a hybrid material that's thermally massive like rammed earth, ten times stronger in compression, and inexpensive relative to other building materials: concrete. It's just that you can't make concrete on-site from the dirt already there, so it doesn't have all the environmental benefits of rammed earth. Any hypothetical concrete replacement is going to have the same problem purely by virtue of being manufactured.

It's a solvable problem, to be sure, but it's not one that needs to be solved for any particular structure when better-characterized building materials are available, so it makes rammed earth a less appealing option for construction. What is more, while those other materials also need testing, they're being tested for compliance with listed standards rather than having to figure out the relevant physical properties ex nihilo so it's possible to abbreviate the tests somewhat.

[redwallzyl]

Ah, but it's just an ENGINEERING problem. True, it'd have to comply with stuff like earthquake resistance, but there would certainly be ways to reinforce such structures. Hybrid materials could work and materials research could look into emulating the beneficial properties of such structures while being stronger, and possibly cheap.

I did mention reinforcement; there are indeed ways to reinforce rammed-earth structures, running all the way from adding cement to the earth itself (this is one of the components of stabilized rammed earth) to filling in a normal frame structure with soil so it's not a structural material at all. Finding the point on that spectrum needed for a given structure in a given area is not a trivial problem.

We do have a hybrid material that's thermally massive like rammed earth, ten times stronger in compression, and inexpensive relative to other building materials: concrete. It's just that you can't make concrete on-site from the dirt already there, so it doesn't have all the environmental benefits of rammed earth. Any hypothetical concrete replacement is going to have the same problem purely by virtue of being manufactured.

It's a solvable problem, to be sure, but it's not one that needs to be solved for any particular structure when better-characterized building materials are available, so it makes rammed earth a less appealing option for construction. What is more, while those other materials also need testing, they're being tested for compliance with listed standards rather than having to figure out the relevant physical properties ex nihilo so it's possible to abbreviate the tests somewhat.

Your missing the other benefits of earth based construction. Mainly the natural thermal regulation. Really the only issue here is we have no institutional knowledge on how the deal with it. Other places don't have that issue. There is literally a whole city in Yemen that is ancient mud brick high rises. If they can figure out how to do that we can figure out how to as well. This is only an issue because we almost never build stuff like this.

[smjjames]

Oh that's 'Cob', I thought you were referring to cobblestone.

Anyways, in an attempt to get back to politics (even though this tangent was going off of resolving housing issues which tangentially came off of the 2008 recession), big shakeups going on in the Cabinet, former George H.W. Bush AG is being picked for AG, Heather Nauert is being nominated for UN ambassador, and Chief of Staff Kelly is apparently planning on resigning soon.

Also, Mueller is expected to reveal today what the Manafort lies were and new details on Cohen.

[Loud Whispers]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2169899/ambiguity-chinese-words-sparks-charges-distortion-us-china
Interesting article surrounding how American editors are deliberately mistranslating Chinese political tracts & military manuals to generate casus belli against China.

Pillsbury argued in his 2015 book that China’s hawks used the intricacies of the Chinese language to conceal a century long “strategic deception” plan aimed at overtaking the US as the top superpower.
For instance, Pillsbury wrote, China officially translated former leader Deng Xiaoping’s description of his tao guang yang hui foreign policy strategy as “bide your time, build your capability”. The translation disguised the idiomatic subtleties of what Pillsbury called the real intention of Deng’s strategy: “prepare for revenge”.
There was reason to be concerned that the US had few “China experts” who actually spoke Chinese, Pillsbury wrote.
The title should be translated as War Beyond Limits, rather than Unrestricted Warfare,” he wrote in the preface to a new edition of the book. The original Chinese title sought to sum up the book’s endeavour to describe a strategy of warfare that would break down traditional boundaries, but still adhere to certain restrictions, Qiao said.
Qiao also complained that a subtitle added later, War and Strategy in the Globalisation Era, was reworded into China’s Master Plan to Destroy America in an English edition of the book.